


Don't Lose Your Fight, Kid.

by orphan_account



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Age Difference, Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Graphic Description of Corpses, Guns, M/M, Slow Burn, Swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-11 04:48:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10455360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Eren Jaeger is not a lucky person, and the fact that he doesn’t stay dead is cold, hard proof of that.





	1. Running on Autopilot

 

Eren Jaeger is not a lucky person, and the fact that he doesn’t stay dead is cold, hard proof of that.

He dies in early autumn in the middle of nowhere after suffering from a 104 degree fever for two days straight. No one’s around to send him off. He’s covered in sweat and blood and snot and puke, and one of his last thoughts is, ‘If the fever doesn’t kill me, then the smell will.’

The fever didn’t like that joke, apparently.

His entire body shuts down within an hour, and a few minutes after that, any old coroner could slap a sticky note on his corpse pronouncing him legally dead with one-hundred percent certainty. Eren’s fine with that. He was miserable anyways.

And when his world blinks from an absence of everything, back to the clear blue sky he’d been looking at when he’d died, he’s _still_ miserable. Just in a different sense. He can’t feel his arms or legs or feet or face, and despite the aforementioned fact, he’s also _fucking freezing_. He tries to shift to a warmer position, and his body doesn’t move at all--it’s like talking to a brick wall. It’s like being encased inside a brick wall.

Then he wishes he could call out for help, but something tells him that if anybody was actually around, they probably wouldn’t want to lend a hand. And that something involves the reality that even lying perfectly still, he can’t feel his own heartbeat.

So tough luck, Jaeger. You graduated from living human to living corpse. Everything’s terrible. Woohoo.

He doesn’t have many other options besides continuing to lay in the grass, so that’s exactly what he does. He wastes some time thinking about Mikasa, Armin, and Mom, and also whether or not it’s possible to get to the ocean on half a tank of fuel. He wastes the rest of the time by hoping that they made it.

As the hours tick by though, something sharp starts stabbing at where his stomach should be--he doesn’t understand why he can even feel it. He definitely doesn’t want to feel it, but there it is. The sun goes down, then up, then down again, and the stabbing sensation seems to crescendo. It gets worse and worse and Eren pointedly ignores it, occupying his mind by counting clouds or stars or birds, which almost never helps. He knows what’s going on and he doesn’t like it, not in the slightest.

Right when it gets to the point of being unbearable--the part where his whole mind would snap like a rubber band and God knows what’d happen after that--there’s a shift in the atmosphere. It goes from stagnant to magnetic, and it’s all because of two sounds far, far, _far_ to Eren’s right.

A gun firing twice.

Boom.

Boom.

Eren isn’t particularly interested in meeting up with a person that isn’t afraid to fire a gun. He’s not really a person anymore, and non-person things tend to get shot on sight these days. So he begs his body to stay down, to lay in the grass and decompose into dirt like any sensible corpse would do.

His body has a different agenda. One that involves getting rid of that stabbing sensation in his stomach. It takes a few minutes for his limbs to rearrange themselves and push him onto his feet, but not too long after, he’s standing upright. Not of his own accord, though.

 _‘Please don’t,'_  Eren says in his head one last time. Whatever else is occupying his brain must not have very good listening skills, because Eren’s legs take a shuddery step forward regardless--it’s a miracle he doesn’t fall face-first back onto the ground.

And then like any respectable zombie in the goddamn apocalypse, he starts staggering his way towards the source of the sound. Because where there’s noise, there’s food. And the thing piloting Eren’s body is absolutely starving.

There’s no way in hell this is going to end well.

 

* * *

 

About an hour into his trek, something is starting to smell like roadkill and perfume, and Eren thinks it might be him.

The sun has been relentless the entire time he’s been walking. It might have rained sometime between dying and coming back. He doesn’t know how many days he’s been dead at this point, but if there’s one thing time is good at, it’s letting things decompose into dust.

So naturally, he doesn’t want to think about what he might look like right now.

Eren gets the occasional glimpse of ashy skin every once in awhile anyways, and the urge to tear it off is overwhelming. He’s lucky (but also unlucky) that he doesn’t have control of his arms.

All this walking is starting to have an end goal; up ahead, there’s a small, trashed town. In the fields around it, Eren can see other silhouettes staggering towards it, just as slow and awkward as he is. He wonders how many other people have died out in these fields. Enough to form a small crowd, apparently.

They’re gathering at the mouth of the town, a wide road sitting squat between two stout buildings. In the middle of that road, there’s a truck. On that truck, there’s a man. The man is holding a handgun.

He points it at one of the corpses clawing at the side of the truck.

Boom.

There’s a spray of red and it flops onto its back. Dead. Again.

The man whips to aim his gun at another behind him, and it falls too. Dead. Again.

Eren really doesn’t want to go over there.  

‘ _Are you seeing this?_ ’ he says to the thing inside his head. It doesn’t give a yes or no, but it keeps pushing him forward. Towards the man. Towards the gun.

 _‘Do you understand what guns do?’_ he asks it. _‘They kill things. And_ I’m _a thing.’_ If he could, he’d be pointing at himself for emphasis. But his feet keep up their steady pace.

They’re getting closer. Enough so that Eren can see the man’s face and its stone-cold indifference as he picks off zombies, bullet by bullet. No matter how many fall in front of them, the remainder keep walking forward, towards the man. It starts to dawn on Eren that to the Infection, it doesn’t matter how many bullets get lodged into his body--or anybody else’s body, for that matter. The only thing it cares about is getting a meal.

Less than ten yards away, the man’s mouth is a straight line. His black hair is sticking a little to his forehead.

The corpse ahead to Eren’s left jerks like it’s been electrocuted, then collapses. There’s a clean bullet wound in the back of its head. Oh no.

 _‘Run!’_ Eren shouts, but the muzzle of the gun is already shifting, angled so that even from here, he can see a perfect circle from where the bullet will exit.

Eren decides that he’s had enough.

He feels the Infection wrapped around his brain; it’s black tar stuck between the crevices, pulsating ever-so-slightly. So he imagines himself taking a solid handful, and he _yanks_.

Everything explodes into hyper-saturated hues and too-hot-too-cold temperatures and pain, pain, **pain**. He tugs again, and everything hurts again. But the thing in his brain doesn’t seem to know what’s going on; it doesn’t fight back. It shrinks away and cowers, and suddenly, Eren can properly feel his hands. He takes a shaky step backwards in confusion.

Then something punches him in the shoulder, and it punches him _hard_. He spins as he falls, face-first into the dirt.

What he _wants_ to shout out is a big, fiery ‘FUCKING OUCH.’ What comes out instead is an ugly, hoarse scream.

Someone else shouts “fuck!” for him, but Eren doesn’t really care at that point. His left shoulder is on fire and the thing lodged in there is rubbing against every nerve that he _just_ got back in control of and Jesus Christ it is so bright out here, why is it so bright out here?

The handgun is firing off a lot faster now. Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang it goes, and someone else’s corpse falls on top of him. The same person from before shouts “shit!” and Eren still doesn’t care. He thinks he can feel where the entry wound is, but it’s not bleeding much at all, judging from the lack of blood that should be pooling around him--wouldn’t it be bleeding? If there’s no blood, does that mean he’s hallucinating?

The corpse on top of him is kicked off and someone grabs his shoulder to flip him over to his back and holy shit, holy shit, the wound is real, oh God, he’s dying, he’s dying again.

The man from the top of the truck is perched over him, and his grey eyes look like guilt and gunmetal. He says something that Eren can’t hear, then leans forward with his pointer and middle fingers poised to take Eren’s pulse.

He’s not going to find one.

So Eren, fueled by pure desperation, slaps the man’s hand away as hard as he can manage. He tries to say “Don’t fucking touch me,” but something must’ve stopped working in his brain, because it comes out as an incoherent mess and it doesn’t matter much because suddenly all he can focus on is the bite wound on the hand he used to hit the man. It’s an unholy mess of purple, green, and blue, and the teeth marks are only _just_ visible if you concentrate, but he’s so so so so so so so so so tired and frazzled that it just looks like a bad bruise.

Eren wonders how one small wound could cause him so much trouble.

And then he’s drowning in tinnitus and static, and the man and the sky above him are fizzling into the same fuzzy image that swallows up everything around him, to the point that he can't see and can't feel and can't think about anything else whatsoever.

  
It’s the best thing to happen to him in days.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...well that was dramatic
> 
> anyways i'm a sucker for zombie AUs and i had an idea i kinda wanted to act on.... so... [will smith poses aggressively]
> 
> i hope the pacing wasn't too weird, or anything! i'm not planning on this being a super extensive fic, so my goal here was really kick things off and go go GO. i'm usually so guilty of stretching out scenes, so this was a bit of a challenge to me, pffft
> 
> few other notes:  
> -the title of this fic comes from all time low's "missing you"!  
> -sorry for any typos, i don't have a beta, but my schedule's erratic enough that i am not looking for one! i'll do my best to edit mistakes if i find 'em  
> -i'll clarify it in later chapters, but i'm just gonna say it now: eren and his friends have been aged up! they're all 20. 
> 
> aaand i always overelaborate in this section so i'm just gonna cut myself off--thanks so much for reading!


	2. Two Idiots, One Truck

 

He wakes up in a truck.

Or rather he snaps back to reality, and he’s in a truck. “Wakes up” is a tricky choice in phrasing because sleep’s supposed to make you feel better and Eren’s not too sure his eyes were even closed in the first place or whether someone who’s dead even _can_ sleep, but the point still stands.

He’s in a truck. It’s moving.

The backseat his cheek is pressed against is made of black leather, and it smells the same as Eren does. Death with a hint of something sweet. Nauseating.

Eren drags himself into a sitting position, only realizing he’s covered in a wool blanket when it slumps into his lap. There’s a dull ache in his shoulder; one that gets sharp like shattered glass when he shifts it too quickly. He tries to say “ouch,” but it comes out as a grunt.

Someone in the front seat grunts back. Eren can see the back of their head. Black hair clipped into an undercut.

“Good morning jackass,” they say in a flat voice. “You bled all over the upholstery.”

So naturally, Eren pauses to look at the upholstery.

There’s a single patch of blood smeared where Eren’s shoulder was--it’s barely anything.

He raises an eyebrow.

Either the driver isn’t looking, or they don’t care enough to respond.

“Also, have you ever taken a single bath in your life?” they ask instead. “The car smells so bad that I’d burn it to the ground if I didn’t have places to be.”

Eren, now fuming, opens his mouth to fire off whatever offensive comeback rockets to the front of his mind first. But then the stranger turns to glance back at him and every thought he has dies out with a whimper.

The man’s eyes are still the same gunmetal grey as before, but now they’re practically unreadable. It’s unnerving. Mildly terrifying.

Eren, at a loss of what else to do, points a finger at the bullet wound in his shoulder and keeps his eyes fixed on the man’s. ‘ _You shot me._ ’

The man stares at him with a bored expression for a moment. Then he shrugs, turning back to the steering wheel and the road ahead. “Sorry,” he says. “If it walks like a corpse, looks like a corpse, and acts like a corpse, then I treat it like a corpse.” Another pause. “If the world hadn’t gone to shit, you could have been a damn good actor.”

That throws Eren for the loop.

“What?” he asks, but the word shrivels up and scrambles itself into nonsense before it’s even left his mouth, so it comes out as “ _Wuhhh_?”

The man’s lip curls ever-so-slightly, and he takes a long, heavy moment to glare at Eren, as if the sound was a bag of dog shit dropped on his front porch. “Don’t act like a zombie if you don’t want to get _shot_ , brat.”

...He doesn’t know.

 _Oh_ , this is rich--he doesn’t fucking know!

The guy hadn’t taken his pulse and now the situation at hand is like a set-up for a fatalistic joke--If a survivalist crams a zombie into his truck and remains none the wiser about it, which one of the two passengers is the most brainless?

The answer is probably Eren, because he hasn’t yanked open the door handle and rolled out yet.

“We’re both fucking idiots,” he says, because it feels like the right thing to say. And then the words start to turn into incoherent slop again, and Eren realizes that he legitimately _can’t speak_. The part of his brain that sorts through and helps him vocalize words is honest-to-God fried.

He forces his mouth shut mid-sentence.

There’s a beat of silence before the man up front clicks his tongue in disappointment.

“You really can’t speak, can you.”

He’s not sure the man is looking at him because there’s no rearview mirror in the truck, but he shakes his head. ‘ _No_.’

“Hm.”

Silence.

The sky outside the windows of the car is pearly orange and pink; the soft grey clouds hang low over the fields of wheat, and for the first time since he became fully conscious, it occurs to him that he has no idea where they’re going. He sits up a little straighter. Peers through the window a little harder, looking for any road signs.

“We’re too far out into the country for that,” the man helpfully provides, still sounding bored. “Just shut up and sit back.”

Eren wasn’t even trying to talk in the first place. Huh. This guy’s proving himself to be a giant bag of dicks. And the way that he refuses to tell Eren where they are is suspicious; his head is getting dizzy with worry over that. He starts looking around the cabin of the car, for something, anything.

It takes a bit of shifting around in the back seat (alongside a fresh wave of pain from his shoulder), but he spots it nestled by the man’s left side. A folded up map with a bright red circle around a town with a name he can’t quite read. He leans a little closer, squinting to see the letters.

Suddenly, the man snatches it out of sight, cramming it into the glove compartment and slamming it closed. “You don’t need to see that,” he snaps.

But Eren _wants_ to see it. And if there’s one thing he’s full of, it’s spite.

He shuffles to try and climb into the shotgun of the truck.

The man doesn’t like that very much.

“Don’t,” he grits out before freeing up a hand to try and shove Eren back, but Eren is committed now. He sticks one of his long, gangly legs over the armrest between the two seats and tries to haul the rest of his body into the chair while minimizing how much he uses his left shoulder. It still hurts. It hurts like fucking hell. The man shoves harder, and the entire car does a nerve-wracking swerve before evening back out. They’re lucky the roads are pretty empty nowadays.

“Shut up,” Eren says as the man continues to curse him out, and it sounds more like “ _Saahd uhp_. _”_  He settles into the seat, slaps the man’s hand away again, and pops open the glove compartment. The car takes another slight swerve. Eren pries out the crumpled-up map, and reads the name of the town. Huh.

 _“Wuhy Tr--_ ”

One of the truck’s front tires pops. 

The entire car bounces up, then down, and Eren’s forehead collides with the dashboard. The man is a little luckier thanks to his seatbelt. They both grunt as the car twists side to side to side before jerking to a sudden stop--one that prompts inertia to launch Eren forward, using the dashboard to punch him again, this time in the stomach.

The quiet that settles over the car is a lot more ominous than the first time. Eren slowly turns to gauge the man’s reaction. He’s shooting a look at Eren that promises a lot more bodily harm.

So Eren weakly reaches over, and opens his car door. He bonelessly slumps out.

There’s a pen in the dirt in front of his face--from the glove compartment? Maybe. He snatches it up, quickly scribbles out a question on his unbitten hand.

Then there’s a hand yanking him up by the back of his shirt and he fights back a little, lashes out a foot that nails the man in the kneecap. It doesn’t do much. Somehow his feet get back under him and he’s standing, turned around and hunched over so that the man--who’s apparently shorter--can look him square in the eye.

“Why does it feel like you're only capable at ruining things?”

The anger emanating off the man isn’t even frothing hot. It’s ice-cold clinical steel. Every word out of his mouth is leashed like an attack dog on a linked chain.

“First you make me waste ammo, then you fuck up my plans, then you somehow manage to ruin my car--”

Eren shoves his hand out, in the man’s face.

_‘Why Trost?’_

The man’s jaw twitches.

“I was going to help you,” he says. “You think bullet wounds fare well when you pack them full of shit and dirt?”

A wound infection is the least of Eren’s worries now. But regardless, his stomach starts a slow descent towards the soles of his feet.

“I know a doctor that owes me a favor or fifty,” the man drones on. “But now we’ve got a solid few days of walking to get there.” He pauses. Looks around. “...And it’s nighttime.”

Sure enough, the crickets are starting to chirr, and the sky is rapidly darkening. The air is still heavy with humidity.

The man lets go of Eren’s shirt.

“Do what you’d like,” he says, turning back towards the truck’s open doors. “I’m setting up camp.”

Eren uncaps his pen and rapidly writes out something else on his hand, making a noise that prompts the man to turn back around.

“What?” he asks, voice flat. Eren sticks out his hand again.

_‘I’m Eren.’_

“Don’t care,” he says.

Eren frowns. He points at the man, then makes a questioning gesture.

The man stays expressionless. There’s enough of a pause that Eren thinks he might not get an answer, that he somehow pushed too far, but--

“--It’s Levi,” the man belatedly answers. He looks weary in this lighting, at least ten years Eren’s senior. “Go do something useful,” he says. Then he hauls himself back into the car.

Eren takes a moment to stand around, do nothing. Everything about this is weird, surreal, _uncomfortable_. But then again, it’s been that way since the world started self-combusting a few months ago.

He walks off, and starts collecting tinder for a fire.

 

* * *

 

About an hour or two later, they’re set for the night with a can line strung around some hastily-placed pikes of wood, a small fire, and a battered tent.

Levi is polishing the barrel of his handgun.

Eren is trying to figure out how many miles away he is from his family.

Dinner had been a depressing affair. They had each gotten a can of beans for the night, and it had been more food than Eren had seen in weeks. He ate the entire thing in the span of five minutes, and threw it all back up again in the span of another five minutes.

 _‘I think I have a stomach bug,’_ he’d written on his hand to show to Levi, who’d watched on with a bored expression. The lie wasn’t too much of a stretch, honestly.

But back to the present.

Eren is trying to remember the name of the small beach town his dad owns a house in. It’s a eclectic little place with more surf shops than houses, and he thinks that if he can just remember the name, then someone in Trost might recognize it, and give a good guesstimate.

So yeah. He wants to go to Trost. And he wants to see if anyone there can point him in the right direction.

He doesn’t know what to do about Levi and the doctor, though. It’s a miracle that he hasn’t been figured out yet, and if anyone could weed out the truth, it’d be a doctor. Eren nervously glances over at Levi.

He’s still polishing his gun, using a stained handkerchief to wipe off the nonexistent dirt. It all seems pretty unnecessary, but who is Eren to judge? Maybe it’s how Levi stays sane out here.

A small breeze brushes past them, and Eren shivers. The temperature has been dropping steadily, almost relentlessly. Eren is still feeling just as cold as when he first came back from the afterlife.

He stands up from his spot on the ground, walking over the perimeter of the camp and ducking under the can line. He hears the handgun being placed down, at Levi’s side.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Levi asks.

Eren twists back around. He mouths, ‘ _Car. There’s a blanket in there I think_.’

Levi’s mouth is a straight line again.

“Let me go grab that,” he says. He pulls himself back onto his feet in a suprisingly graceful manner, halfway over to where Eren’s standing before Eren’s waving him off.

‘ _I’ve got it_ ,’ he mouths. He paces over to the shotgun side of the car, wondering if he’d dragged the blanket up front when he’d climbed over.

“Kid,” Levi says, “I don’t want you rooting through there.”

Eren scoffs. _‘What,’_ he says in his head, _‘are you worried I’m gonna break your car more?_ ’ He tugs open the door. The blanket’s sitting in a tangled mess on the floor of the carriage. Eren reaches for it, bundling it up in his arms.

“ _Brat_ ,” Levi starts.

But then something clatters onto the ground, falling out from the folds of the blanket. It probably was bumped out of the glove compartment at some point. Eren peers down at it.

The rearview mirror looks surprisingly intact, except for the clean break at the top, where the plastic stem is. Someone must’ve snapped it off of its perch by the windshield. Eren can see his own reflection in it.

He looks a little paler than usual, slightly purple around the joints, and mildly bloody everywhere else, but that’s not what bothers him.

The irises of his eyes aren’t sea-green.

They’re filmed over with an ugly white, leaving only his torn pupils in plain sight.

It’s painfully obvious that he’s fucking dead.

So Eren slowly turns around, dropping the blanket. Sure enough, Levi is standing behind him.

“You can try to run, if you’d like,” he says. His eyes are hard--no, _suffocating_ to look at.

Eren suddenly understands why the mirror was hidden. And he’s not sure if Levi’s been pretending to be dumb with good intentions for Eren or good intentions for someone else or good intentions for himself, but Eren doesn’t like being played like a fool even though he _is_ a fool, the biggest goddamn fool the world has ever seen.

He needs to find his family, and he doesn’t know whether or not Levi is standing in his way.

That’s way too many variables for one decision, and there’s way too little time to sort through them all.

So Eren plays it safe.

He runs.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CAR SAFETY 101: don't let eren into any sort of automobile ever 
> 
> anyways i really wanted to update, so tada! the ball's still rolling pretty fast ahah, but i promise we're not going to constantly be left with cliffhangers every chapter LOL
> 
> sorry for any typos! i got hit with a spur of inspiration so a lot of this was typed quickly; i do my best to avoid typos, but i'll clean 'em up if i find 'em!
> 
> finally, thanks for reading! :^)


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